Active Interview

The term active interview does not denote a particular type of interview as much as it suggests a specific orientation to the interview process. It signals that all interviews are unavoidably active, interactionally and conversationally. The dynamic, communicative contingencies of the interview—any interview—literally incite respondents' opinions. Every interview is an occasion for constructing, not merely discovering or conveying, information (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995).

Interviewing is always conversational, varying from highly structured, standardized, survey interviews to free-flowing informal exchanges. The narratives produced may be as truncated as forced choice survey responses or as elaborate as oral life histories, but they are all activated and constructed in situ, through interview participants' talk.

Although most researchers acknowledge the interactional character of the interview, the technical literature on interviewing tends to focus on keeping that interaction in check. Guides to interviewing, especially those oriented to standardized surveys, are primarily concerned with maximizing the flow of valid, reliable information while minimizing distortions of what respondents know. From this perspective, the standardized interview conversation is a pipeline for transmitting knowledge, whereas nonstandardized interaction represents a potential source of contamination that should be minimized.

In contrast, Charles Briggs (1986) argues that interviews fundamentally, not incidentally, shape the form and content of what is said. Aaron Cicourel (1974) goes further, maintaining that interviews virtually impose particular ways of understanding and communicating reality on subjects' responses. The point is that interviewers are deeply and unavoidably implicated in creating the meanings that ostensibly reside within respondents. Indeed, both parties to the interview are necessarily and ineluctably active. Meaning is not merely elicited by apt questioning, nor simply transported through respondent replies; it is communicatively assembled in the interview encounter. Respondents are not so much repositories of experiential information as they are constructors of knowledge in collaboration with interviewers (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995).

Conceiving of the interview as active leads to important questions about the very possibility of collecting and analyzing information in the manner the traditional approach presupposes (see Gubrium & Holstein, 1997). It also prompts researchers to attend more to the ways in which knowledge is assembled within the interview than is usually the case in traditional approaches. In other words, understanding how the meaning-making process unfolds in the interview is as critical as apprehending what is substantively asked and conveyed. The hows of interviewing, of course, refer to the interactional, narrative procedures of knowledge production, not merely to interview techniques. The whats pertain to the issues guiding the interview, the content of questions, and the [Page 7]substantive information communicated by the respondent. A dual interest in the hows and whats of meaning construction goes hand in hand with an appreciation for the constitutive activeness of the interview process.